If Marx was right in his opening remarks of "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" in 1852, then is he in trouble? Remember the opening lines? "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice." he wrote. "He forgot to add: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce." Look what is happening now. Not a day has passed without seeing a piece titled "Karl Marx was right." It is a kind of a second coming for the great philosopher and activist. Che Guevera has turned into a disco dance tune lately and what of Marx now? Should we be concerned? I don't think so.

However, it is as if this time it is different. This time his teaching is discussed in corporate boardrooms. George Magnus, a senior economist of the commercial bank UBS quoted him the other day. The quote was in an investment advice text. Karl Marx entering corporate boardrooms to find a solution to the Great Recession of 2008! Is it weird? No, not at all.

Marx is part and parcel of our civilization

First let me say that if capitalism was left to capitalists only, we all would have been doomed long ago. Capitalism did not have any incentive to go beyond Victor Hugo slumps of the Industrial Revolution without criticism from the left. So in this sense the teaching of Karl Marx is part and parcel of our civilization. Nothing weird is going on.

The interesting part is to understand why we have this growing interest lately. I see a few reasons: One is the literature on the relations between growing income inequality, increasing debt and the crisis of 2008. It started with the remarks of Paul Krugman in the New York Times. Then Robert Reich's "Aftershock" was published in 2010. Then in November 2010 came an IMF research paper on "Inequality, Leverage and Crises." In both cases, the growing income inequality led to increased leverage on the part of the relatively dispossessed to maintain their level of consumption. That, the authors argued, led to toxic assets in the financial system. The IMF paper then noted the importance of income redistribution schemes to prevent crises. "The sky is falling," isn't that so? This is the IMF, the high temple of modern day capitalism. This is the first reason.

Capitalism breeds instability

So the culprit is growing income inequality. But the buck does not stop there. Today why the number of not-so-rich is high, many of them are unemployed, but there is no mechanism to help them consume beyond their means. The dream machine has been broken. It was inherently unstable as we all know now. Capitalism breeds instability. That's the second reason.

Thirdly, as noted in The Communist Manifesto: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle."

This time it is the middle classes, relatively dispossessed and fully connected to the world, that are turning the wheel. With the Great Recession, the relatively dispossessed feel cheated at the center paralyzing their governments in dealing with the crisis. "Unemployment is the problem not the debt." At the same time, they feel left out on the periphery, seeing that it is harder to migrate to the center as it was in the past, they started a rebuilding effort in their homelands. That's how I see the Arab Spring, the Chilean Winter, the London looting and the Berlin car burnings.

Che Guevera has become a dance tune for discos, but I am not afraid of Karl Marx. Let's see what Obama will make out of it in the upcoming American elections.

This commentary was published on 03.09.2011 in Hürriyet Daily News.